With apologies to the analytics crowd, a hockey season (any hockey season) is about stories.

There are intertwined stories that must be untangled, one strand at a time. There are little stories you find in a corner of the dressing room, write in 30 minutes and forget. There are stories writers tell each other while waiting at airports, stories teams make up for nosy reporters, stories that dominate an entire news cycle and vanish.

Then there’s the over-arching narrative, the story that dominates a season more than any other. Parsed and pondered and spun, it will come to define the histories that are written long after the ink has dried on yesterday’s newspaper and the digital columns have vanished into the cloud.

Last season was all about the trade that shipped You-Know-Who to Nashville for Tower of Power Shea Weber. Weber was a season-long force on the blue line and during the playoffs he locked up Rangers’ forward Chris Kreider and threw away the key — but You-Know-Who almost won a Stanley Cup for the Predators while playing every game entirely by himself. (Or at least that was the narrative.)

The year before that was the Season Carey Price Got Hurt. No need to add a thing to that one.

There was the lockout season, the season Chris Kreider barrelled into Carey Price and might have kept the Canadiens from a Stanley Cup final. Going farther back, there was the year Saku Koivu beat cancer, the year Mario Tremblay drove Patrick Roy all the way to Colorado, the Miracle Cup years of 1971, 1986 and 1993.

This season, for better or worse, will belong to Jonathan Drouin. No, he won’t be the team’s most important player — that will be Carey Price as long as he is here. But Drouin will be the story. A major francophone talent with considerable charisma and the ability to fill that top-line centreman role that has been a question mark since Koivu’s skills began to erode? Of course he’s the story.

The Hate Fans have already decided that Mikhail Sergachev, the top prospect who was sent to Tampa for Drouin, will win multiple Norris Trophies while Drouin will choke. Mercifully, they’re wrong. From what we have seen so far, Drouin is a perfect fit as the Canadiens embark on their quest for a 25th Stanley Cup: personable, outgoing, articulate in both official languages and a brilliant talent on the ice who appears comfortable with the spotlight that will be on him in perpetually hysterical Montreal.

Even if Drouin fails, he’s still the story. But he won’t. Having him at centre ice transforms this team up front: At a stroke, the Canadiens have gone from being a hole-in-the-doughnut organization to one that is knee-deep in young centremen.

If you’re looking for reasons for optimism as the Canadiens begin the season, Drouin is near the top of the list, but there are more if you keep an open mind:

1. The Kindly Old Coach. I’ve dealt in some way with every Canadiens coach since Pat Burns and Claude Julien tops my list, slightly ahead of Alain Vigneault. He’s the salt of the earth, a genuinely good man and a superb coach. He has the Stanley Cup ring to prove it. There’s a reason he’s tapped to work the bench with Mike Babcock on the world’s biggest stage. And this time, he’s here for an entire season.

2. Balanced scoring. It will take some tinkering but with Andrew Shaw coming alive, Drouin in the middle, Paul Byron and Charles Hudon burning up the ice, Brendan Gallagher healthy, Alex Galchenyuk capable of an explosion at any time and steady Max Pacioretty kicking in his 35 and Weber on the point on the power play, this team can score.

3. The Wall. You don’t write off any team with Carey Price, period. Incredibly, general manager Marc Bergevin was ripped for signing the Hall of Famer long-term.

There are always surprises, but I see the Canadiens in a tight four-way fight at the top of the Atlantic Division with the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Ottawa Senators and (yes) the Toronto Maple Leafs. It says here that Boston will slip into a group with the second tier including Detroit, Buffalo and Florida.

A wave of injuries to key personnel and all bets are off — but that’s true of any team in the league. If the Canadiens are healthy, the key will be how well Julien can sort out the blue line, with regulars Nathan Beaulieu, Alexei Emelin and the redoubtable Andrei Markov all gone along with Sergachev, who figured to be in the mix this season.

Even on the back end, there is reason for optimism. Jordie Benn is here for the duration, Victor Mete could be spectacular if he sticks and no team with Weber in the lineup is entirely weak on the blue line.

Almost Done!

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